


Someday They Will Be Scarce

by schmevil



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-13
Updated: 2009-11-13
Packaged: 2017-10-02 14:45:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schmevil/pseuds/schmevil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He finds himself thinking around her, around the edges of the her-shaped hole in his life, because that's easier than mourning her honestly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Someday They Will Be Scarce

"Kiss me, kiss me as though it were the last time."

***

Xander has come home. He has honest to god, genuine article, accept no substitutes Cheetos in his hand basket, and racks and racks of pirated dvds to browse. In the succession of small towns he's passed through over the last few months, Cheetos, Fritos, and American junk food of all kinds, are the rarest of rare sights. His stomach has learned to play nice with food from all over the continent - kanyah, dabo kolo and fool, oh god, what can he say about fool, except, you'd have to be one to not love it. Africa is the best thing that ever happened to his stomach.

Still, there's something about good old-fashioned, real American, heart disease in a bag. They say that sense memory is more powerful than regular, and they might be right - even without opening the bag, he can practically taste them from here.

An old guy squeezes past Xander on his way to the freezer. He does everything to avoid bumping into him, but finally Xander takes pity and makes room. The narrow aisles of the convenience store are really only meant for one, so this means he gets to see the movie selection really up close.

At first he thought that people were just being polite, trying not to bump into him even on crowded buses. It took a mouthy proto-Slayer in Kinshasa, to explain that a scruffy looking foreigner with an eye patch, generally wasn't someone that people wanted to talk to. Par for the course, the guy doesn't make eye contact as he passes. Sometimes they sneer, which is worse.

The worst time though, was when he was mistaken for an aid worker, in the middle of slap fight between a military government and the local quasi-socialist rebels. That time, he'd learned that it wasn't a good idea to tell quasi-socialist rebels that the whole Communist guerilla thing was seriously retro. Not good times. About the opposite of good times, really. But in a distinctly human kind of way. It's funny, but it almost would have been better if hadn't been.

Xander realizes that the movie he's been staring at without seeing for the last few seconds is Casablanca, and he immediately starts laughing. Like most port towns, in Dar El Baida you can find anything, so it's no surprise to find such an important artifact of American pop culture.

It's not actually laugh out loud funny, but he's standing in a shitty convenience store, getting the brush off from strangers and dreaming about Cheetos, remembering the first time he watched this movie with her. It shouldn't be funny that he's in Dar El Baida, AKA Casablanca, looking at the movie, and remembering the way she laughs.

The thing is, it's the first time he's thought about her in months, and it's some stupid movie-in-the-city-by-the-same-name coincidence, that brings it all back.

The old guy, coming back from the freezer with a bag of ice in his basket, actually looks at Xander this time. He sends Xander a look that could kill - so nasty it could melt adamantium - if he wasn't so busy laughing at himself.

The guy mutters a curse and heads for the cashier like Xander's contagious.

***

The first time they watch Casablanca, it's in bits and pieces, between orgasms. It's early on, when their relationship is pretty much non-existent and many parts of Xander are blissfully happy about his very first non-friend-with benefits.

She isn't even a friend yet, not really, but what she is, is incredible.

"You're the best there is at what you do," he says into her belly. In the background, Ilsa is telling Sam to play it, for old time's sake.

"While it's true, I was voted best vengeance demon, three centuries running, I'm not exacting bloody justice from unfaithful men anymore." Do they get medals, he wonders. A tasteful plaque, perhaps? "But it's nice of you to say that."

She pauses, considering something. "That was a compliment, right? It sounded like a compliment, but sometimes it's hard to tell."

"It was a compliment, but not about your spectacular ability to ruin the lives of men everywhere."

"Oh, then what is it that I'm the best at doing?"

"This," he says, trying to sound sexy.

Her face kind of scrunches up like a rat, but cute. Rats shouldn't be cute, and neither should be demons, but he finds this all less troubling than it should be.

She starts talking about 'this' and the ambiguity of his statement, segues into an 'ambiguous' two-timer she turned into a frog during the French Revolution, and when she starts talking about the million and one ways to cook frogs, he has to stop her.

"Sex, I meant sex."

"Oh, I see."

"You sure know how to take the sexy out of being naked with an incredibly beautiful woman."

"If that was true, you wouldn't come over so often for orgasms." He can't fault her logic, but he's tempted to argue. At least until she looks away from the movie, to level a frank stare at him. There's no one else like her, no one so easy to read, and completely unashamed.

"Do you want to have another orgasm?" she asks, and he completely forgets his point.

"Yeah, ok."

***

She's really good at being distracting, so he forgets almost immediately that they were going to watch Casablanca that night. It wasn't like, a preplanned indoctrination - it just happened to be on and he stopped channel-surfing when he noticed it.

At first she doesn't like it, because of the outdated technology. You can't accuse her of understanding things like sentimentality. But eventually she decides that it has a certain quaint charm, and reminds her of the time she'd been called to settle things with a bartender.

Xander tries not to dwell on the whys of her liking Casablanca, because it means he gets to watch it pretty regularly, and - usually - to make out with her at the same time.

Sometime after the first time they watch it, she asks him over to watch movies and have sex - by this point she's got a better handle on human idiom - and at the movie rental store, the only thing they can agree on is Casablanca.

Originally, she wants to watch Wallstreet because she truly believes that greed is good. He wants to just go home and watch Temple of Doom for roughly the millionth time. They get into it, in the middle of the store, and the when the clerk starts giving them the evil eye - which in Sunnydale, could actually _be_ the evil eye - Xander starts looking for the first thing that won't make one of them crazy, and get in the way of their real plans for the night.

He grabs something that looks ok-ish and holds it up for inspection.

"Top Gun?" she sneers.

"What's wrong with Top Gun? Planes, motorcycles, hot babes both female and male - it's got it all."

"We watched homoerotic buddy movies all last week."

"Top Gun is not homoerotic."

"Xander, I was the patron saint of scorned women for over a thousand years. I know homoerotic when I see it."

He hisses her name like a curse.

"What?" she asks, genuinely puzzled.

He waves to the ever-expanding circle of no people around them, and to the guy two aisles over who keeps eyeing them warily from behind a display of spaghetti westerns.

"No more public crazy talk."

"This is Sunnydale. There's a Hellmouth. Demons are old news."

"Never underestimate the power of denial."

This spurs another one of her trips down the most disgusting of memory lanes. Xander tries to tune it out and just blend into the scenery. If he's honest with himself, he retains a lot more from her moments of demonic nostalgia than any sane person would like to admit.

"What about this?"

Absorbed in trying to hide inside his jacket, he's missed the end of her story. Thank god. "Casablanca?"

"I thought you liked this one. A story of doomed love, and fighting for justice against all odds."

"Well, yeah. But how did you...?"

"We watched it two weeks ago."

Xander stares at her, confused, until she shadow-puppets her way through an explanation.

"Oh! And you actually remembered it?"

"Studies show that women are far better at multitasking then men."

The lady who's wrangling her three children through the children's section, blushes and moves further away.

This time they actually watch it all the way through, and though her take on the movie is far from the standard - as it is with most things - a tradition is born.

***

She develops a serious fascination with the movie during her infiltration phase.

After the Initiative she starts to pay more attention to passing. It becomes even more important when she takes over the Magic Box from Giles, because as she discovers, it's not a good idea to make the neighborhood business owners nervous. Within a month she goes from weirdo pariah, to respected member of the Sunnydale Small Business Association, known for the awesome cupcakes she brings to meetings.

Xander is her Good Boyfriend and later, her Good Fiance, and everyone in the SSBA thinks they're adorable - if a little weird, because neither of them would ever be normal, even if they could pass as close to - and waste no opportunity to tell them what a great couple they make.

At some point, he's not sure exactly when, the whole normal life routine becomes less of an act, and more of a genuine desire for useless Pottery Barn products. The transition is so smooth and effortless that he doesn't notice it until one day, he wakes up and asks himself when the hell he became someone's fiance. His anxiety over this fact comes and goes, and usually goes because she's still - will always be - incredibly distracting.

She starts to wear her hair in soft waves, like Ilsa and it's the sexiest she's ever been. He keeps forgetting that every time she changes her hair, she's the sexiest she's ever been.

Now, when they watch Casablanca, or anything from that era, she watches like someone will be quizzing her on it. He wonders what she finds so important in it, but doesn't ask, figuring she'll eventually tell him. She never does.

Later, he will wonder if was because of him, if she thought that was what he wanted - to be cool and jaded Rick, to someone's luminous Ilsa - or if she saw something of what was coming.

Casablanca ends with Rick sending off Ilsa, despite the fact that he's in love with her, so she can keep on fighting the good fight. Xander's always thought that Rick was the real hero of the movie, but lately, he finds himself wondering.

***

She almost sleeps through the end of the world. He pets her hair and tries not to remember the first time he did that. Tries not to remember much of anything.

As it turns out, the world doesn't end when Sunnydale does, and she wakes up in time to die.

The last time he hears her voice, she's talking to Andrew. "Nobody cares, you little monkey." It should be a disappointing memory, but it isn't. That's her, everything you could learn about her, in five words, the matter-of-fact, isn't-it-so-obvious delivery, and that always surprising courage.

He hangs onto it, and every time he checks in and gets Andrew, who somehow manages to be even more annoying over the phone, he remembers her like that. Xander gives him credit for at least trying to keep it business, like he wants, but it's Andrew, whose heart has the consistency of runny oatmeal. After about a minute he always breaks Xander's unspoken rule, like it was never there in the first place.

He at least doesn't say her name. But he starts talking about his feelings, and his feelings about Xander's feelings about her, and Xander blurts it out. "Nobody cares, you little monkey."

Andrew's end of the line goes silent for a long moment. Geek to the bone, he immediately recognizes it. He's probably got an internal file for everything she said and did.

"She was... she was..."

"I know what she was," he says a little meanly. He hears it in his voice, the echo of a thousand unhappy childhood memories, and this stops him from saying something worse.

There's no way out of this awkward moment except to hang up, so he says he'll call for the next check in and hangs up before Andrew can respond. Andrew doesn't get any better after that. Xander doesn't let himself start to hate him.

There's one line, that he always wanted to throw at her, and never got around to.

"Because my dear, I suspect that underneath that cynical shell you are at heart a sentimentalist."

Xander changes his mind everyday, on which one of them is Rick to the other's Ilsa, or if Casablanca is even a good metaphor for a relationship that went off the rails when he realized that he couldn't love her the way she needed, couldn't be married to her and not start to hate her and himself.

The thing is, with her, it's no shell. She doesn't have defenses like other people. When he discovers a new part of her - her addiction to expensive shoes, her compulsion to defrost and clean out the freezer on a weekly basis - they're genuinely new, or so long buried that they might as well be.

It's not cowardly to do what's best for both of them. That's his mantra for as long as she's alive. After she's dead, when he's busy trying to lose himself in work, away from everyone he's ever known, he gives it up. He's trying to forget her, forget what he misses, every second of every day.

He talks to Andrew, after Sunnydale swallows itself up and disappears. He needs to know. Keeps asking, did you see her? did you see her?

The last time he sees her, she's carrying a sword and pushing Andrew around. She's all kinds of beautiful.

He doesn't get to say goodbye. Between the impending apocalypse, and trying not to think about said apocalypse, there isn't time. He doesn't know what he could have said to her that she wouldn't have found ridiculous.

"She was incredible, she died saving my life."

"That's my girl, always doing the stupid thing."

That's the last time he talks or thinks about her for months.

***

"Xander are you ready to go?" Reine asks. He looks up from the movie, surprised to find her towering over him. She's got a politely quizzical look on her face, curious but never too curious.

Xander takes everything and just shoves it back down inside of him, because he's not going to have a moment with this girl he barely knows. He stopped laughing a while ago and he's got years of practice at pretending not to be falling apart at the seams, so he just fixes a bland expression on his face and represses.

Say what you will about Sunnydale, but you're pretty much guaranteed to be a world champion at repressing, suppressing and implausible deniability, if you make it out alive.

Still, it's like trying to build a dam with his bare hands and no tools - bits of her keep leaking out. So he concentrates on not looking crazy in front of his latest Slayer find.

In the week they've been traveling together, he's learned that she's: a) great at respecting boundaries, but mouthier than a sailor on shore leave; b) even worse of a cook than he is; and c) ready to hit the ground running with the whole Slayer thing. She's made it through a civil war, three years of hitchhiking across the planet doing anarcho-environmental protest, and Xander's cooking.

He can't say that he hasn't noticed her beauty. He would have to be dead - really, really dead and not warmed over demon-dead - not to notice her hotness. Physically, Reine is nothing like _her_. She's tall. Taller than Xander, with no curves to speak of. Dark, dark skin and eyes. Hair cut so short there's nothing to play with.

They meet in Kinshasha. She saves his life, after he messes things up with the local authorities for the second time since he left America. He's not actually looking for Reine - she moves around so much that even Willow finds it difficult to get a lock on her - but he figures it out almost immediately. Hard not to, when she's tossing guys across the room one-handed.

Reine thinks it's awesome, especially the part where she suddenly has hundreds of sisters, and can't wait to meet Buffy. Xander always tells them about Buffy. Sometimes he feels like he's a missionary for the United Church of Vampire Slayers. There are worse jobs, he figures.

She'll be good, he thinks, when she gets over the idea that she can handle everything on her own.

His attraction to her is vague, and never fully formed, despite the fact that she's almost exactly his type - beautiful, dangerous and unavailable (emotionally or otherwise). He's attracted to her like he is any pretty girl that he meets, and he never finds himself thinking about her when she's not around. This isn't something he works on. It's like his libido is set in the off position.

"Casablanca?" she asks.

"Yeah. Have you seen it?"

"Once. Sort of. Not all the way through. I couldn't stand it. You?"

"Couple times," he says. Her eyebrows go up - there's a question she wants to ask, but she's not going to, because there are plenty of questions she doesn't want him to ask her. What she doesn't get is that beyond making sure she gets on her plane, he doesn't actually care. Reine is a great girl and under other circumstances he'd probably be a lot more into her greatness.

Xander puts the movie down. "Come on, let's blow this popsicle stand."

"Cool. Hey, are those Cheetos?"

"Yes, but they're all mine."

"All of them?"

"Every last morsel of delicious, fake-cheesy goodness." The cashier is a lot friendlier, now that Reine is with him. Suddenly he transforms from scruffy foreigner with an eye patch, to the guy who's standing beside a hot chick. That's something he'll miss about Reine, when she's in Scotland and he's tracking down the next new Slayer.

She hesitates at the door. "Hey, did you want to go get that movie?"

"Nah," he says.

Later, after he's seen her off, he locks himself in his hotel room and falls into a bottle for a week.

It's not exactly true that after she dies, after he leaves Sunnydale and everything else, he doesn't think about her for months. It's impossible not to be reminded of her a thousand times in a day. Even when there's nothing that reminds him of home, when he's a week into the Sahara, with traveling companions who don't even speak English, he thinks about her.

He finds himself thinking around her, around the edges of the _her_-shaped hole in his life, because that's easier than mourning her honestly.

After Reine's gone, he gives himself a week off. He spends it drinking, eating Cheetos and obsessively watching Casablanca. The irony is that the movie was never even that important to him, but now it's taken on a talismanic value.

He imagines her beside him, with him still, on the night before the end of the world. She's lying back on the pillows, her hair spread around her like the unholiest of halos, beckoning to him.

"Kiss me, kiss me as though it were the last time," she says.

He does. Leans down into her, savors the feel of her naked flesh against his. They kiss, like it's the very last thing they'll ever do, so they'd better get it right. It's a better goodbye than the one they actually got.

When he dries out, he checks in. This time he gets Giles, who pretends not to be worried about him, while Xander pretends not to be broken over a girl he let go.

He goes back to work and throws himself into passing. By the time he's being taken for a quirky but harmless American tourist and /or business man, he finds that he almost _feels_ that way. One day he even finds himself telling a newbie Slayer about her, about Anya.

After he sees her off, he books a flight for himself. His list of no-longer-Potentials is done, so he wraps things up in Africa, and heads to Europe, ready to be with his family again. Ready to go home for real.

**Author's Note:**

> Yviwriting prompted: "I never loved nobody fully / Always one foot on the ground."
> 
> Lines from Casablanca: "Kiss me, kiss me as though it were the last time," and "Because my dear, I suspect that underneath that cynical shell you are at heart a sentimentalist." The title is also a Casablanca reference. "How extravagant you are throwing away women like that. Someday they may be scarce."
> 
> Lines from Buffy (Chosen): "Nobody cares, you little monkey," "She was incredible, she died saving my life," and "That's my girl, always doing the stupid thing."
> 
> Lines from Marvel Comics: "You're the best there is at what you do." A bastardization of Wolverine's famous "I'm the best I am at what I do." Hence the reference to adamantium.


End file.
